XXII
LAZARUS
My breath is wrenched from my chest with such violence, I sink upon the earth to the dewed grass below. It welcomes me with a sigh, receiving my trembling knees yet offering no comfort. My heart is gripped, cruel and unrelenting, pulse stilled as though unwilling to endure what my soul had already perceived. I clutch my chest, unwilling, no, unable, to accept what I know to be true. Breath returns sharply, but it does not reach the extremities of my despair.
“No,” I whisper. My voice is lost to the solitude of the clearing. The stars above me sing of death and betrayal.
It is in that instant that I feel Astaire’s death.
Help me, I beg, in silent desperation. But the stars do not care for my miserable soul. The firmament offers no reply; it looks down upon my turmoil with cold indifference.
I always wished to know, to feel, to love, and yet, now the world denies me even that. In Astaire, I found solace. His beauty was a reprieve from the hell I endure. Even if I could not lovehim openly, I could love him in secret. But if my affections can no longer be lived, then let it be written in blood upon my soul.
The anguish that surges through my arteries is more unrelenting than any pain inflicted upon me by my maker, worse even than the first death I suffered when I was yet mortal. I want to tear myself apart, cry out with such fury and despair that the moon flees in terror and veils its face from the horror I have become.
I cast myself forward, and the rage that consumes me lends a dreadful strength to my limbs. I run as I feel, with terror and desperation, so swiftly that the earth scarcely feels my passage, the helms of grass below wholly untouched by my feet.
Yet even this unbearable anguish could not have prepared me for what awaits within my maker’s tomb.
There, at the feet of my creator, lies Astaire, limbs sprawled, as is his hair, around him, like a fading sun illuminating the darkest part of the chamber. A thin line of crimson stains his vinaceous hair; his skull is fractured, open, his limbs grotesquely contorted. His throat is torn—a sickly gash—tendons bitten through and dangling like wilted flowers.His vertebrae have been crushed so fully that his flesh must strain to hold what remains.
Astaire’s face is turned from me, hidden, half-submerged in a scarlet pool.
The sight shatters me utterly.
I fall to my knees, gathering him in the coarse ruins of my own hands. I press my brow to his chest, as if I could crawl inside him, as if the closeness alone might erase death. But there is nothing—only silence and blood and a grief too vast for utterance.
Above him sits my creator on his wooden throne, grinning like the personification of madness itself. Blood drips from his mouth and trails down his cadaverous chest. Astaire’s life hasbeen wasted as if it were meaningless, left to dry on his petrified skin for the amusement of a thing too far gone to know cruelty from joy.
My maker’s eyes fall upon my mortified face, and he starts to laugh—a laugh not of mirth but of malice, an abominable cacophony that cleaves the silence with its ugliness.
“You soft-spoken miscreant. Sickly silken flower…” he snarls, his voice a broken thing. “You…you believe yourself capable of cunning, melifluo?” he screeches. “You think you possess strength? Intellect? Will? You are nothing. Not even the dust beneath a worm’s belly. Less than nothing. I would not soil the wordcretinby naming you such.” His cackling fills the chamber, multiplying as it ricochets off the cavern walls, until there is nothing left in the world but the shrieking of a madman.
But within me is no room for madness. I am filled with nothing but rage and love and sorrow. I can feel it burning through every part of my being.
My creator dissolves. He no longer exists. In his place, there is only Astaire—Astaire…and the ruin he has become. I see blood upon the snow. Rose petals strewn across beds of azahar. A pearl within its shell.
The cackling grows shriller, now mingled with the hideous wheeze of blood in his lungs. All these sounds pervade my body, and I absorb them into myself until I feel the rage of the gods growing inside me. I stoke a wrath hotter than hell’s pyres, and when the flames roar too high for my body to contain, I hurl myself upon my maker.
His laughter dies in his throat, choked off as I grip his ossified flesh with my power. My wrath is absolute. One of his withered hands I grind to powder between my fingers. The other, I tear from his body and cast it down like an offering to the serpents of the pit.
“Think, you fool,” he seethes. “To destroy me is to bring about your own end. I know you better than you know yourself. You haven’t the will to?—”
I drive my hand into his chest.
His ribs, turned to stone over millennia, lacerate my arm. But I feel no pain. I am beyond flesh, beyond suffering. Only revenge guides me now. I dig deeper. I find his heart, an anathema, still beating, stealing time from a world he has spoiled.
I wrench it from his chest.
A torrent of blood erupts with it; Astaire’s blood, desecrated and hoarded, spills upon my face. It coats my lips, and I lap it up, refusing to waste a single drop.
It is all that remains of him, and I shall cherish it until death takes me. With reverent hands, I lay the heart beside Astaire’s corpse like an offering.
But though my maker’s chest lies torn and empty, I feel his voice still, like a parasite. attempting once more to enter my mind. I clench my jaw. Never again shall I be his plaything, a mere trinket for his depraved amusement.
“Death shall descend upon you…you…” his voice croaks, but my hands, dripping with the putrescent spoils of his innards, close upon his withering throat.
I steal one final glance at my beloved, still unmoving beneath the throne’s tenebrous shadows.
